Let me warn you. This story has no real resolution... except if you count a thorough — and well deserved — spanking from my mother.
When I was a kid, my family — as well as the majority of the families in my Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood — had many household staples and services delivered right to our house. On an almost daily basis, long before I awakened for the day, the little metal box that rested just outside our kitchen door, was filled with glass bottles of milk by a mostly unseen (at least by me) milkman. Sometimes, the milk was accompanied by butter and perhaps a dozen eggs. In summer, my mom would order lemonade or fruit punch and they would arrive along with the milk, in the same type of glass bottles. Every so often, on a weekend morning, I would actually get to
see the milkman when he would come to our house to collect payment for his deliveries. He looked just like the guys I saw on TV shows and commercials. He wore all white with a black bow tie and shiny-brimmed cap. He'd park his truck at the foot of our driveway, bound up to our house and gently rap on our kitchen door. My mom would let him in and, depending on the amount of the bill, she'd pay in cash, extracting a few dollar bills and coins from her purse. If the Pincus family tab had gone unpaid for a few weeks (which was normal for my family, in keeping with my father's notorious mishandling of funds), my mom would pull her checkout from her purse and dash off a voucher for the outstanding dairy balance.
In addition to milk and dairy products, we'd get potato chips, pretzels and other assorted snacks from the Charles Chips driver. Once a month or so, that familiar truck would pull up and the driver would carry two big metal tins up to our house. The light-tan colored one was filled with crispy potato chips and the dark one was filled with pretzels. My brother would practically wrestle the pretzel tin out of the driver's hands. My brother laid unspoken claim to any pretzels that entered our house, almost demanding
permission if a small sample of his private stock was to be had by anyone who wasn't him. Charles Chips offered cookies once in a while. I liked those. I liked them so much, my mom would often hide them somewhere in the kitchen so I didn't consume them all as soon as the package was opened. She knew what little Josh was capable of.
When I went to the supermarket with my mom, I marveled at the fact they sold items that we got delivered right to our house. Who was buying these items here?, I would think. Doesn't everyone get these things delivered?
Along with milk and snacks — and even dry cleaning — the Pincuses had home delivery of bread. Following approximately the same schedule employed by the milkman, the bread man would supply us with loaves of bread, as well as hot dog and hamburger rolls. In direct competition with Charles Chips, Freihofer's Bakery (from whom we got our delivery) would offer cookies. Their marketing strategy was different, however. The driver — a genial, avuncular gentleman that the kids in the neighborhood called "Uncle Ben" — would tear open a package of cookies and hand them out to the kids, in hopes they would beg their moms to
purchase additional boxes. Of course, it worked... at least in
my house it did. Uncle Ben would wave to the kids as he drove his open-door delivery truck through the streets of my neighborhood. He'd politely tip his hat to the kids as he visited their homes, toting loaves of bread that would soon be used for school lunches and weekend breakfasts.
Before I was aware of an unprovoked pall of anti-Semitism befalling my neighborhood, I was friendly with several kids on my block. Prior to bigoted parents filling their children's impressionable minds with ideas that my family and I were responsible for killing the savior they worshiped on infrequent Sunday visits to church, we were all content to play tag and dodgeball and kick-the-can together, regardless of our religious beliefs. One of my closest friends was Lou, who lived across the street from me. Lou was a year or two older than I. However he, nor any of his siblings, ever attended the same schools the
rest of the kids in the neighborhood attended. They all went to what was referred to in the 60s and early 70s as "special school." This, of course, was a euphemism for a facility for either delinquents, incorrigible troublemakers or learning disabled students. Lou and all of the children in his family fell into
some or
all those categories. Lou's father reminded me of the title character of a popular newspaper comic strip called "Moose Miller." Moose was a slovenly, scheming, unkept, ne'er-do-well who spent most of the daily three panels and Sunday eight panels reclining on a threadbare and patchwork sofa surrounded by stray animals, beer cans and trash. That was Lou's house. It was dark and dank and it smelled of burnt food, pet waste and sweat. No one was quite sure what Lou's father did for a living, as he was always home when
other dads were off at work. Lou's mom was equally as disheveled. She would sometimes join a little sidewalk klatch of neighborhood moms to discuss household matters and maybe even a little gossip. Lou's mom would casually reveal some sort of unusual quirk that she
obviously thought was the norm. Her views on personal grooming and child care were always points of astonishment among her peers. Once, she told my mom that she and Lou's father were never "officially" married — which was positively
shocking in the pseudo-suburban world of the late 1960s. Lou had two unseemly older sisters who were
both — as I recall — slutty and scummy. He had an athletic older brother who was friendly with
my athletic older brother. Lou's younger brother was creepy in a "Damien" from
The Omen sort of way. He often yammered on nonsensically and I don't remember understanding too much of what he had to say.
One summer afternoon, Lou and I were cavorting on our front lawns, as kids on summer vacation were prone to do. Our playtime was interrupted when our pal good old Uncle Ben pulled up in front of my house in his Freihofer's Bakery truck. "Hiya, fellahs!" he said, as he bounded out of his truck carrying two loaves of bread and his ledger book. He was obviously going in my house to collect on the outstanding balance owed by the Pincuses. Would my mom be able to satisfy our debt with the few bucks she had stashed in her purse... or would she have to dip into the available funds in the checking account?
This is where memories get a bit fuzzy. To this day, I am still not sure how, why or by whom the idea was hatched... but hatched it was. Lou and I stopped our playing and approached the rear of the parked Freihofer's Bakery truck. With Uncle Ben otherwise occupied in my house, one of us opened the back door and together we entered the truck. Inside, the back portion of the vehicle was lined with aluminum wire shelving, fully stocked with dozens and dozens of packaged loaves of bread, assorted rolls, cookies and a smattering of other baked goods that the Pincus family never requested. As though possessed by a controlling but unseen force, Lou and I began tossing loaves of bread out the open back doors and into the street. Acting like we were a crucial link in a makeshift "bucket brigade" that ended with us, we seemed to be determined to empty that truck of every last example of bakery product we could grab. Again, after 50-some years, I seemed to have blocked out the motivation behind our actions. We were just two dumb kids throwing bread out of a truck for no good reason.
As Lou and I were engaging in our decidedly illicit behavior, my brother and Lou's brother were sitting across the street on Lou's front porch. Their discussion was abruptly cut short when, in his peripheral vision, my brother caught a glimpse of several oven-fresh projectiles being launched out the back doors of the nearby Freihofer's truck.
"Hey!," my brother exclaimed, "There's bread coming out of that truck!" He directed Lou's brother's attention to the scene. Just then, Uncle Ben, having finished his financial dealings with my mom, was greeted by the same scenario as he ambled down my driveway. He quickened his step and advanced towards the posterior of his truck. He stood, dumbfounded and speechless, at the open doors, finally mustering up the strength to say "Hey!" Almost instantaneously, he was joined at the back door by my mom... and she was none too happy. She shrieked! She didn't say any actual words, she just shrieked. She took a small step into the truck, grabbed my forearm and yanked me out. My mom dragged my up the driveway — still shrieking — and threw me into the house. A few seconds later, Lou's mom appeared and led Lou to his house in a similar fashion, although she clamped two vise-like fingers onto his earlobe instead of his forearm... but the sentiment was the same.
I honestly don't remember too much of the aftermath. No doubt, I received a severe spanking from my mother who was tasked with keeping order in the Pincus household and was a much more feared disciplinarian than my ineffectual father. I'm not sure if home deliveries from the fine folks at Friehofer's Bakery continued. I do remember eventually purchasing bread from the supermarket, so perhaps my mother severed all ties with Uncle Ben's employer out of sheer humiliation. However, this story received many a retelling over the years. First in high school and continuing on in my life. When he became old enough to understand what his father did was dead wrong, I related the "bread truck incident" (as it had come to be known) to my son — who delighted in its stupidity and reveled in my childhood shortcomings. At recent gatherings in our home, I have even caught my son beginning the story to an eager group of listeners and inserting himself as the main protagonist. "That didn't happen to you!," I'd say, "That's my story!"
Somehow, that made the story funnier.
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